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The new design possibilities of immersive AI are real, but so are the risks. Intelligence that enters the room can enrich experience or silently erode agency. It can strengthen communities or fragment them. The difference is in the design. The 2026 Manifesto for Immersive AI provides ten considerations for designing
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State of Cities of Things: design for the interplay of humans, urban robotics, and physical AI Last November, it was 7 years after the launching paper was presented at NordiCHI, "Near future cities of things: addressing dilemmas through design fiction". It made me think it would be nice
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Welcome! Whether you've encountered the Wijkbot in person or heard about it, read on for an introduction to how the Wijkbot came about and its journey so far. On this website you'll find many examples of neighborhood robots built in workshops, in the Cities of Things
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This week, Wijkbot is present in different forms at two events, one in Amsterdam and one in Delft. ESConference, Amsterdam, 11-13 February 2026 The Wijkbot Kit 2.0 is part of the ESC conference exhibition, the annual conference of the Expertisenetwork Systemic Co-Design*, held 11-13 February at
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At MakerDays 2025, the MakerFaire in Eindhoven, the Future Parade is a fixed part of the programme on 27 & 28 September 2025. The Wijkbot was part of the parade with a special version of the Gemaal op Zuid Rotterdam project, where children build their own robots from leftover market
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Weekly reflection on human-AI-things collaborations The shift isn’t from human coders to AI agents. It’s from coding to engineering. Every, the company behind Lex (which I’m using right now), released four predictions for 2026. The one that stuck with me: the rise of the “agentic
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On 17 July, Cities of Things was invited by Catch A Fire Agency to organise, design, and moderate a speculative design workshop for one of their clients on the topic of Agentic AI and its relation to the addiction to immediacy. The workshop was part of a full-day program
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Since this year I update the Substack Cities of Things with a short speculative design exercise. In good current habit, in a back-to-back composing with Claude (via Lex.page): I bring in my thoughts, I create an object concept and Claude is creating a little day-in-the-
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How do you collaboratively and creatively work towards systems change? And how can you share, deepen and scale the knowledge that emerges from this? In this publication, designers and creative agencies from our network share their knowledge products: card sets, games and prototypes that emerged from design practice in transition
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On 9 May, the Wijkbot was once again at Maker Faire Delft, this time as a guest at Stadslab Rotterdam. In addition to a WijkbotKit, the platform was used for a first demo version of a Lab Cart — a way to bring makerspaces into the neighbourhood. A new Maker Faire
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Next to our newsletter, organizing knowledge sharing, and commissioning of research projects, we have developed over the last years two specific activities to help understand, and formulate insights and opinions on our future co-living with agentic physical AI in our neighborhoods and cities. Futuring and Civic Prototyping Two types
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Let me share some updates from the last quarter at Cities of Things. Newsletters We started a fresh format for the Monthly newsletter, applying speculative design techniques to build a story on the near future living with agentic things in the city. The recipe is: * The weekly reflections of my